The aim of this paper is to investigate about the role of innovation in favoring the creation of a closer relationship between the firm and its customers by the use of the web and its tools, considering the importance they have gained in the latest years.
The choice of studying marketing innovation in service firms comes from the analysis of the literature, in which we found a huge number of contributions on innovation in the manufacturing industry while there are few researches that focus on the service industry. Furthermore, the studies converge on the technological dimension and do not consider that ICT can be a tool for other forms of innovation that can be deepened, here including marketing innovation. Hence, the focus is on the role of innovation in marketing activities in favoring the customer’s involvement in the service creation process, stimulating a closer relationship between the firm and its customers. Web can constitute a valid tool in supporting decision makers since it allows accelerating this process.
Theories on innovation have been developed within the huge field of contributions on innovation in the manufacturing industry (Audretsch 1995; Becker & Dietz 2004). Looking at the service industry, there is a lack of contributions on the role of innovation in enhancing firms’ offer.
The first contribution on the innovation in the service industry refers to Barras (Barras 1986) and his “reverse product cycle”, according to which innovation in services takes place through three main phases (Gallouj & Weinstein 1997):
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1.
the incremental process innovation, that aims at increasing the efficiency of delivery of existing services;
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2.
the improvement of service quality that comes from more radical process innovations;
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3.
the emergence of product innovations, which favor the creation of new services or the whole transformation of the existing ones.
This contribution sheds light on the technological dimension of innovation. Further studies on the theme open the boundaries of the research, identifying other fields of study on innovation in the service industry. Within them, the marketing and the relationship with the customers gain increasing attention from the scholars.
Our study is articulated as follows: in the first section, we analyze the literature on the issue, trying to find some assumptions that can be useful to gain evidences. In the second section, we explain the methods used to collect and analyze the data. Among the service firms, we focus on the telecommunication sector, investigating on firms’ initiatives in identifying web tools that are able to favor customer involvement. The reason why we chose to examine firms operating in this sector is that it is high-tech based and with a strong competitive need of innovation. We then conduct our analysis trying to answer to the main research question, that is:
“How and to what extent are firms able to use web tools in order to favor the customer involvement in the service creation process?”
In the third section, we describe the results that help us to answer to the research question and to get to some conclusions, explained in the fourth section. The limits we encountered during the study are discussed at the end of the article.
Theoretical framework
In order to study the innovation in the service industry and the role of this phenomenon in focusing the attention on the customer and his key role in producing new innovation, the theoretical framework is concentrated on two streams of research, that are the open and the user innovation (Fig. 1).
Open innovation emphasizes the role of the interactions between external and internal ideas in creating value (Chesbrough 2006), while user innovation focuses on the role of users (individuals as well as firms – (von Hippel 2005)) as leading innovators since their skills and competences have a key role in the creation of innovation. The competitive scenario imposes firms to change their business models, searching for new ideas that can come from the outside world and assuming new internal processes and technologies to improve their competitive position (Chesbrough 2007).
Hence, firms can develop and implement innovative ideas based on the opinions and comments the costumers express using the online communities.
A community can be defined as an organization that includes individuals with diverse backgrounds and preferences: their interaction generates fresh and complementary resources, knowledge and competencies (Bossink 2002; Oliver & Ebers 1998).
Therefore, customers can actively contribute to firms’ innovation processes through the sharing of their opinions and ideas. The so-generated innovation can lead to a better performance and value creation, not just for the firms but for the customer as well, since the service/product is built with the purpose of answering to the needs of the demand (democratized innovation – (von Hippel 2005)).
In the telecommunication sector, van Cuilenburg and Slaa (van Cuilenburg & Slaa 1995) provide a definition of process and product innovation that is useful to reach the objectives of this study, stating that process innovation refers to the improvement of efficiency in production, while product innovation refers to the availability of new choices and opportunities of information and communication for customers (product differentiation).
According to the aim of this paper, we focus on the first aspect of innovation related to the service industry, investigating on how the customer can favor the creation and the development of new products becoming part of the co-creation process.
As previously said, in order to obtain sustained advantage for a company operating in the field of telecommunications, it is important to innovate constantly service offerings, possibly up to individual customers (Kristensson et al. 2008). In order to achieve this goal, it is desirable to involve customers in the innovation process to make them co-creators of the value, which is provided to them in the immediate future.
In order to study the degree of innovation, recalling some works on innovation in other sectors (Della Corte 2014), we propose some variables that explain the level of innovation a firm can show (Fig. 2).
Responsiveness to consumer
In the telecommunication industry, quality is a key factor in influencing customer satisfaction. In the field of marketing activities, firms can get a deep sense of customers’ needs and expectations in order to align their products/services quickly. The key success factor in the implementation of innovation of telecommunications services is information, with specific reference to the wishes and requirements of the customers as well as to the form of the competition offer. The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) activities include the understanding of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, matching their expectations and answering to their compliances, enhancing the service quality and the customer care (Akroush 2011). Innovation can be introduced both at the induced and at the organic level of the service creation process, with the purpose to reach a greater comprehension of customers’ needs and create a mutual value for firms and consumers (Vargo & Lusch 2004).
Customer involvement
At this second step, the costumer is directly involved in the process of service creation: the firms enquire about their necessities and preferences and incite for innovative proposal and initiatives that can improve the offer. Customer involvement in the innovation process permits the creation of more customized services that encounter the target expectations, dedicated offers and activities, which enrich the demand satisfaction and retention.
Media and social innovation
The experiential component of the service fruition makes the media and social innovation tools crucial to guarantee the consumer’s enjoyment and contentment. This dimension represents the highest degree of engagement of customers.
At the first stage - the responsiveness one - firms establish their propositions of value and receive feedback after the consumption phase.
At the second stage - the customer involvement - there is the co-creation between the firm and its customers through the participation at the production phase.
At the third stage - the media and social innovation - since the customer share his ideas, needs and suggestions, he almost becomes a “producer” and makes the firm able to create highly customized products and services. This is the case of crowdsourcing activities, in which users create network and share knowledge through the web. Firms can use this collective intelligence opening an online contest, a sort of competition between freelancer working for a specific project, product launch, etc. Hence, firms looking for intellectual capital and professionalism on the web can use the networked knowledge to carry out important marketing strategies (Della Corte et al. 2013).